


I Know It Well

by Tonight_At_Noon



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, But a lot of fun, F/M, Snow, and bucky doesn't like the stuff, but he clearly likes darcy, darcy has never seen snow before, hopefully, not a lot of description, so maybe they can work something out, very dialogue heavy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 18:23:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16938342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tonight_At_Noon/pseuds/Tonight_At_Noon
Summary: Darcy wakes up to a snowstorm and she convinces Bucky to take her outside.





	I Know It Well

**Author's Note:**

> We'll pretend Darcy is from someplace where it never snows. We'll pretend Bucky is safely with the other Avengers and that Civil War ended happily. 
> 
> We'll pretend any of this is plausible.
> 
> This is inspired by the crazy snowstorm that just swept through the town where I live.
> 
> Enjoy.

_you said, ain't this just like the present_

_to be showing up like this_

_as a moon waned to crescent_

_we started to kiss_

*** * ***

It’s been dark outside for hours by the time Darcy wakes up and finds him in the kitchen area of the compound. Her bruises are slowly coming to the surface. There is a particularly nasty one rounding out her left cheek. The scratches from the glass that sliced her skin are neatly stitched, but they still look painful.

When she gets close enough to the counter where he’s sitting, he stands abruptly, startling her. She jumps, her hand going to her chest.

“What the hell, man?” she says, scowling at him. The expression drops a moment later and is replaced by a painful wince. The medicine might help a bit, but it’s never enough. He knows that much.

“Sorry,” he says as she plops in the seat beside him. He remains standing, watching her body move as she tries to get comfortable. Bitter anger clings to his tongue. She wasn’t supposed to get hurt. But she did, and he’s almost surprised by how badly he wants to tear apart the people who did this to her. “Do you want me to heat you up some dinner? It’s nothing special. Just pizza.”

“Um, sure.” Darcy’s glassy eyes follow him to the countertop where the box of cheese pizza lies with its lid open.

He carefully selects a piece that isn’t too big or too small and sets it on a plate. Approaching the microwave oven, he searches for the button that opens the door. 

“Do you know how to use that thing?” Darcy asks. “‘Cause I’d hate to make it out of that fight from this afternoon only to be blown up because the hundred-year-old guy making my dinner didn’t know how to work a microwave.”

“I’ll have you know,” Bucky says distractedly, struggling to locate the correct button, “that I am a master at microwaving things. Ha!” He excitedly presses a button. The microwave whirs to life. Swearing, he frantically presses the giant red button and the machine comes to a stop. 

Darcy sighs behind him. “I’ll help. Sit down before you kill us both.” 

And then she is right there, breathing against his neck, pushing him aside. Her rough touch inflames his skin. Obeying, he shuffles to give her room and watches as she masterfully selects all of the right buttons and has her pizza heating up in under ten seconds. She faces him and smirks briefly, forgetting about her injuries once again. Which doesn’t surprise him. Darcy Lewis, a civilian if there ever was one, is not used to being in the centre of battlefields. Let alone is she used to being made a target.

The two stare at each other while the pizza spins and the complicated, giant machine zaps it with what he can only assume are dangerous heat rays. Her lips are still pulled into that almost-smile she always wears. The kind of almost-smile that makes him think she’s just waiting to laugh at him. Which she does. A lot. Mostly because of his cluelessness when it comes to modern technology. 

But sometimes, his favourite times, it’s when he cracks a stupid joke that successfully makes her laugh. He loves those moments, because he can see the joke reach her and watch exactly how her body reacts. It’s starts with a slow tremble of her mouth, then a twitch of her cheeks, then her jaw splits and her blue eyes crinkle. 

“I’m okay.”

He jolts, moving his eyes to hers. He had been staring at her mouth. “What?”

“I’m okay,” she says again. “Bucky, you don’t have to look at me like I’m about to fall to pieces.”

He’s about to respond—with what, he isn’t sure—when the microwave beeps. Darcy turns away from him again and removes her food. She takes it to the stools. Following close behind, he sits right next to her and wonders what advice Steve would have for him at this moment. 

It’s funny. Once it was him offering Steve advice on girls, but now it’s the other way around. Spending seventy years as a brainwashed slave to an evil organisation will do that to a person. It’ll make them unable to figure out how to talk to pretty girls without worrying if they’re going to strangle them when a bad memory takes over. 

Okay, so maybe it isn’t that funny. He isn’t laughing, and if he told Darcy, she wouldn’t be laughing either.

“I know you’re not going to fall to pieces,” he tells her. “I just wish”— He clenches his metal fist, forcing away the images from earlier that day. 

Darcy swallows a bite of food and brushes aside her long hair. “What do you wish?” 

Without looking at her, he says, “I wish you hadn’t been there.”

“You and me both, dude. I have a wedding to get to in a week. I don’t think these bruises will be gone by then.”

Bucky laughs. She’s much better at getting him to laugh. He faces her. “Who gets married in the dead of winter?” he asks.

Finishing the slice, she wipes her hands on a napkin and rolls her eyes. “Crazy people.”

“Well, I hope it’s not an upstate New York wedding. I don’t think the snow will be gone by then, either.”

Darcy’s entire body freezes. He watches her go completely still. Nervous that she is having some sort of an attack, maybe a side effect of some unknown brain injury, Bucky reaches out to her and grabs her arms, fear taking over his ability to speak. 

“It’s snowing?” she whispers, taking ahold of his forearms and clutching tight. Her nails dig into his right arm. 

He relaxes, but doesn’t release her. He likes her touch too much to let go. “Yeah. It’s pretty bad out there.”

Before he can say anything else, Darcy leaps off of the stool and rushes to the nearest window. Bucky scrambles to join her. A thick sheet of snow covers the back lot of the compound, and Darcy is jumping up and down, clinging to him, making indistinguishable noises as if she has never seen snow before. 

“Oh my God! It’s so beautiful. There’s so much of it! Bucky, have you ever seen so much snow!” she asks, her body practically pressed against the glass. In the excitement, she seems to have forgotten about her ailments. 

Bucky can’t stop himself from laughing. “I grew up in Brooklyn. We saw snow like this every winter.”

She turns to stare wide-eyed at him. She looks just like a kid. A happy kid whose mind has just been blown. “Every winter?” 

He nods. Those snowy days in Brooklyn as a kid were heaven. No school. Sledding. Steve coming over to have hot chocolate to warm up his tiny body. 

Snow means something different to him now. He can’t look at the stuff for too long before he’s transported to the train. To the last time he was truly Bucky Barnes. 

So, he doesn’t look at the snow. He looks at Darcy as she looks at him, smiling as if her face is clear of bruises and stitches. 

“You have seen snow, right?”

“Yeah, sure, on TV. We don’t get snow in California, and I’ve never travelled anywhere that does get snow _when_ it’s snowing. I timed my New York trip perfectly.”

“Darcy, just this afternoon you were”—

—“I know, I know,” she interrupts, waving her hand impatiently at him and returning her focus to the globs of snow drifting. “But that doesn’t matter now. Can we go out there?”

“Into the snow?” He balks. “It’s freezing.”

Darcy turns fully away from the window and glares up at him. “I love the cold,” she says daringly. 

“There must be, what, a foot of snow. Do you have any shoes to wear? Any snow gear at all?”

“Fuck snow gear! I’ll go without you,” she warns, eyeing the staircase behind him. 

He has lost. Saying no to Darcy is one of the hardest things he’s never actually done. In the months since they met, he has been at her every beck and call. Tonight, even with the snow, is no different. 

“Fine,” he says. “Let’s go.”

*** * ***  


She is beautiful in the snow. She’s beautiful everywhere, but especially in the snow. Her hair is covered in the stuff and she keeps catching flakes in her smiling mouth. She hasn’t stopped smiling since they came outside. It’s slowly killing him. 

“It’s so quiet,” she says, approaching him. She has to pick up her short legs and waddle a bit like a penguin. Her nose is red, as are her cheeks. They blend in well with the angry gashes he’s pretending not to see. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard the world be so quiet.”

Bucky looks around. The lights from inside the compound are almost all out—everyone else has been fast asleep for hours now—but the ones that aren’t shine onto the snow, giving everything an eerie yellow glow. But she’s right. It’s practically silent. Nothing but the sound of Darcy’s happy sighs meet his ears. 

There are no horns bibbing. No people shouting obscenities. The snow falls gently to the ground around them. It flies quietly through the air. 

How peaceful. 

He keeps waiting to see Steve reaching for him, to feel his hand finally give up, but the memories never come. He’s too busy watching Darcy. 

“I love this,” she says. She holds her hands up and presses them to his cheeks, holding tight so he can’t jerk away. “Even if I can’t feel my fingers anymore.”

“God, that’s freezing,” he says, his teeth chattering. 

She finally lets go and laughs. “Sorry. I couldn’t resist. Besides, I thought that beard was there to keep your face warm.”

“It protects against windchill. Not much else.”

Darcy moves to stand next to him. She curls her arms around his—his real one, so he can feel every press of her—and leans her head against the sleeve of his coat. Standing very still, he trains his eyes on the snowfall, trying to recall the last time a woman who wasn’t a doctor was this close to him. 

“It really is so quiet. I never thought I’d like the quiet this much,” she murmurs, and he thinks he has never heard a sweeter sound before. She tugs his arm. He looks down at her. “Thank you for experiencing this with me, Bucky. And for everything this afternoon. Steve said I’d probably not be here if you hadn’t”—

—“No, don’t say it,” he says, his gut twitching. “You’re alright now. That’s what counts.”

“I’m alright because of you. I’m seeing this snow because of you,” she says, and his gut twitches again but for an entirely different reason. “I can’t believe there are still people who are afraid of you.”

“I’m still afraid of me sometimes,” he admits.

“Don’t be,” Darcy says, rising to her tiptoes. “You’re good. So, so good.”

Bucky’s breath leaves his body the moment Darcy’s lips touch his. His eyes stay open for a second before snapping shut, and he wraps his whole body around hers, thinking to himself that the cold has never before felt so warm.

*** * ***  


His heart is still thrashing when he and Darcy enter her bedroom. Both are numb, but his insides are burning. 

Darcy extracts her hand from his and starts clearing away the mess of clothes on the floor, stuffing them into her open suitcase. The cold stiffness of her bones and joints makes her move slower than normal, and he suppresses a laugh at her attempt to tidy up. 

“You should get into a hot shower,” he says as she finishes.

Straightening, she looks at him with glimmering eyes. Glimmering from the cold. From the pain meds. From _him_. 

Maybe. 

“A hot shower,” she says, contemplating. She is soaked through. Her teeth pulse and clank. Her hair sticks to her face, and he reaches out to push it aside, and her cold lips touch his hand. “You’re cold too. You should get into a hot shower too.”

Is it an invitation? 

Bucky extracts his hand, his mind blanking on what to say. 

“We don’t have to do anything,” Darcy says.

Blinking, he’s surprised to find her standing so close to him. When had she moved? 

“It can be a totally platonic shower. No sex stuff whatsoever,” she says.

He still doesn’t have a response. He’s out of his depth. For so long, too long, he has been focused on survival. Nothing of this nature has crossed his mind for decades. It’s all there now, of course. Drilling a hole right through his brain. But it’s muddled. Confused. Because it’s been dormant since before the war.

He wants Darcy. He is sure of that. He has wanted her since she first made him laugh when she cracked some joke about Steve’s love for a really awful cooking show. But how does a messed up guy like him go about wanting a not messed up girl like Darcy? There is no rule book, no manual to help him out of this weird situation. 

“Sorry,” she says, bowing her head, “for calling it _sex stuff_. That wasn’t very classy of me.”

That makes him smile. It eases his anxiety a little bit. “You’ve never been very classy.”

Lifting her chin, Darcy’s lips twitch, but don’t make the full effort. “That’s true. I just mean that I’m sure this must be so weird for you, and, I mean, you’ve probably not kissed anyone for like eighty years, and it’s not like I’ve ever been crazy attracted to a hundred-year-old man before, so I also have no idea what _I’m_ doing. Not that that’s abnormal for me”—

—“Darcy,” Bucky says firmly, cutting off her spiralling rant. She sucks in a much-needed breath, pulling at her lips. He cups her chin and tugs at her bottom lip, releasing it from her teeth. The pad of his thumb strokes the soft, plump skin. 

“I just mean,” she says again as he continues moving his thumb around her mouth, “that I don’t want to pressure you into anything.”

“I don’t feel pressured,” he says, and he means it. 

“Okay. Good. So, the shower?”

“The shower. I could use one. And so could you.”

Now she smiles. Stepping away from him, she beckons him to follow her into the bathroom. The grey and white tile floor hurts his numb toes, but he barely feels the pain. 

“Even I feel like an old grandma trying to work these controls,” she says, opening the glass door to the massive shower. 

Its large, square shower head isn’t connected to the wall. It hangs low from the ceiling, looking very out of place. The mounted dashboard is a screen glowing with a dozen buttons that all say contradictory things. Darcy presses the panel, jumping back when water sprays down from the head. She fiddles a little bit more, and soon there is steam rising.

Bucky stands back as Darcy turns to him smugly. Without saying anything, she lifts her soaked sweater over her head. He follows suit, looking at everything in the fancy bathroom that isn’t Darcy’s naked body. 

“Come on,” she says. Reaching for his hand, she guides him inside the shower. “Not so bad, is it?”

Not so bad at all. The hot water instantly soothes the aching numbness. His extremities tingle as feeling returns. 

“It’s nice,” he says. Still, he won’t look at her, even if he can feel her eyes mapping out his body. 

“I didn’t realise how badly I was hurt until now,” she says.

That’s what makes him break. He looks at her, concerned her stitches have come lose, but she isn’t bleeding. Her hand prods a blackening bruise on her ribcage, just beneath her left breast. 

“Touching it will make it hurt more,” he says thickly. 

“Yeah,” she says, still scanning her skin for marks. She catches another bruise on her side. Smaller than the other, but apparently more painful. She hisses, and Bucky grabs her wrist before she can hurt herself again. “Right, sorry. Touching it will make it worse. Yeah.” 

Nodding, Bucky lets go of her and focuses on warming his body up. Darcy appears to do the same. She doesn’t talk again until the water starts cooling without either of them having touched the controls. 

“I guess that’s our cue,” she says, fiddling with the panel. Suddenly, the water cuts off. 

Bucky exits the shower, wishing to God he could be in there the whole night. Finding two fluffy white towels in the linen closet inside the bathroom, he hands one to Darcy and uses the other to dry himself, all the while contemplating in his mind all of the things that had happened in his life that led to him standing naked in a bathroom with Darcy Lewis. 

In the brief moments when he started waking from HYDRA’s restraints, when he started remembering things, convincing himself he would never really be free, he would have never dreamed this life would be waiting for him. But here he is, and here Darcy is. And he’s happy. Sort of. He’s on the brink of it—happiness. He can feel it trying to get to him. 

And he thinks, when it finally reaches him, he won’t push it away.

They dress in clean clothes. Tony has comfortable shirts and sweats in every room in the compound, which Bucky used to think was weird, but now he doesn’t mind it. 

Darcy is quiet, like the snow, as they exit the bathroom and reenter her bedroom. She stuffs her wet clothes in the laundry basket beside the black wooden chest-of-drawers. He does the same. 

“Hey,” she says, taking his hand for the countless time that night. That morning. It must be nearing sunrise. Darcy steps close to him. Her free hand brushes his cheek. “Stay with me.”

“Okay,” he says. 

She smiles. A half-smile. The medication is probably wearing off. 

Boldly, Bucky tilts his head down and presses a kiss to the bruise on Darcy’s face. Then he catches the various scrapes. Her nose. Her mouth. And he stays there, enjoying the taste, glad for once for all of the bad things that have plagued his life. Without them, he wouldn’t be here. He wouldn’t have Steve back. He wouldn’t be enjoying the silence of a snow storm. 

He wouldn’t be with Darcy.

** * * * **

_ and i said i know it well _

_ that secret that we know _

_ that we don't know how to tell _

_ i'm in love with your honor _

_ i'm in love with your cheeks _

 


End file.
